Another First Year Tutorial Handout 10,02,09

21/08/2017

Hello again.

Contents

Tips and jokes; diary entry; pieces reprinted from last week; preparation for next week in the form of Singer on euthanasia. 

Just a reminder that the first essay is due on the 24^th. Feel free to send or give me drafts to comment on.

This week’s tip has been distilled from the ramblings of some ancient idiotic hermit I encountered in a cave in the hills above Lanblethicwmciddian: Live life to the full and do not watch television. Keep your teeth clean, dipping them in the pure waters of a mountain stream, then arrange them neatly on a cave ledge next to your wig. When chasing sheep, always – at that point I had to stop him, dreading what he might say next, and just to make sure that he wouldn’t inflict his geriatric puerilities on other innocent ramblers I rolled him into a ball – he was surprisingly supple – and sent him on his way down the steep mountain slope, bouncing from rock to rock, until he disappeared over the edge of a cliff.

This week’s joke: What did the vicar say when he went into a bar?

Answer: ‘Ouch!’

Diary

Woke up feeling sad after yet another birthday crept up on me and stole the last of my youth away. Part of the problem is that being young is all I’ve ever known, as far back as I can remember, and I think I must have been very young when I was born, so that really I’ve had no experience of anything else. Not that I know exactly how old I am, for my parents were so poor that they could not afford to buy presents, and nothing was ever said about my having a birthday. I worry sometimes that I may be very old, perhaps in my thirties, but there’s no way of checking, because my parents couldn’t even afford to pay for a birth certificate.

Discussion topic

I’ll reprint last week’s piece on what is wrong with killing, and then we can discuss it.

In the fourth chapter of his book, Peter Singer distinguishes between a person, defined as a human who is self-conscious and rational, and a human being, who may not be a person in this sense. For instance, it may be a new-born baby. He considers the view that a person, being self-conscious, has desires for the future, and these will be thwarted if that person’s life is extinguished. This would not matter directly to a classical utilitarian, who believes that actions should be judged by the extent to which they maximize happiness or pleasure. Even if you kill someone painlessly and by surprise, however, you may still affect other people’s happiness, so for this indirect reason the classical utilitarian could judge that your action is wrong. What about individual cases in which no-one is affected in this way? For instance, you painlessly and lethally ambush a person who has no friends or relatives and won’t be missed, and your action does not lead to a decrease in your own happiness. Singer suggests at this point that perhaps in the long run more happiness will be produced if, instead of estimating the utility of each individual action, we adopt general principles of conduct, if only for the practical reason that we are not able to take account of the individual features of each case.

There are also the views of the preference utilitarian, who judges actions not in terms of pleasure or happiness but by the extent to which they accord with the preferences of those who are affected by them. Killing a person who prefers to go on living is therefore wrong.

Such reasoning seems far removed from the view that homicide is wrong in itself. On the other hand, even in everyday life, as distinct from the philosopher’s study, we make distinctions and give reasons when it comes to killing people. We say, for instance, that killing people in wartime may not be wrong, and in peacetime we say the same about euthanasia, capital punishment, infanticide or abortion. All that Singer and others are doing, perhaps, is to be more systematic and consistent in their reasoning.

What do you think of the attempt to be systematic in this way, as manifested in the different forms of utilitarianism? Do such theories capture the underlying patterns of our conduct? In other words, is it really true when you look at moral standards in our society that their observance would tend to increase pleasure or happiness and decrease pain or unhappiness? What about the debate over fox-hunting? What about the view that even nowadays people tend to be narrow-minded about sex, which is one of the greatest sources of pleasure? Could the same be said about recreational drugs, too? What about the fact that qualities of character, the ones that we admire, seem to have no direct connection with the promotion of happiness? Well, perhaps the utilitarian would say that indirectly and in the long run society benefits from people being honest, kind, generous and so on, and that it is harmed by dishonesty, selfishness, etc. But is this true? In any case, why do we admire honesty?

Puzzles

Answer to last week's puzzle, which I reprint:
Suppose you have nine balls identical in appearance, one of them being slightly lighter than the others. You also have of old-fashioned weighing scales consisting of two pans and a dial to tell you whether one object in a pan weighs more or less than an object in the other pan. Whay is the least number of weighings needed to identify the lighter ball? You can place as many balls as you like in each pan.
Answer: two weighings. First, place three balls in each pan. If the lighter ball is among them, that pan will be up, the opposite pan down. Remove the balls. Of the three balls in the lighter pan, place one of each in the pans. And so on.

This Week's Puzzle
The Dollar bills. 
In a bag are 26 bills. If you take out 20 bills from the bag at random, you have at least one 1-dollar bill, two 2-dollar bills, and five 5-dollar bills. How much money was in the bag?